It's pretty disheartening to get an awesome new phone only to realize the bootloader's locked down tight. That's means no custom recovery, no ROMs, no custom kernels, no... anything fun. Until, of course, some dedicated developers get ahold of the device in question and bend it to their will. That's exactly what Project FreeGee has done for both the Sprint and AT&T variants of the LG Optimus G.

The tool essentially unlocks the bootloader of both devices, allowing a custom recovery - and eventually, custom ROMs - to be flashed.

Good news, everyone! ...or at least, everyone with an international LG Optimus G and an inclination to try out custom ROM builds. The ubiquitous CyanogenMod ROM is now available for LG's flagship, beginning with nightly CM 10.1 (Android 4.2) builds. CyanogenMod developer Ricardo Cerqueira broke the news on his Google+ account, noting that the new builds are possible thanks to the FreeGee tool expanding to the international (E975) model.

As always, you'll need a custom recovery to apply the ROM, and ClockworkMod has also been ported from to the international Optimus G model.

The Optimus G on Japan's Docomo network is an interesting device, as it ships with a mandatory access control system that basically prevents remounting system, reading boot, executing tasks with root privileges, and things of that nature. Thus, the root process for this version of the Optimus G was a tricky one.

A backdoor found by Android hacker giantpune will be used, which allows the bootloader to be unlocked, a modified boot.img to be flashed, and some security features to be disabled – ultimately allowing root access to be achieved.